I posted a question on Twitter yesterday about finding an easy way to podcast and did get some feedback. Most of what I heard was about how to do it within my blog and that process sounds fairly simple. (Thank you to those that offered suggestions.) The problem is, I’m not doing this through my blog or any blogging platform, I’m doing it for my church.
Currently, our website is non-existent, with the exception of a page, mainly stating our location and service times and at the moment, Mary is working on our site using Web Empowered Church (WEC) as the platform. The full site should go live within 30-45 days and the sweet thing is that there is a podcasting module built into that. At that point, podcasting should be simple.
For now, I’m just curious about the mechanics of creating a podcast. After doing a little research, I created my XML file and uploaded it to the same location as my mp3 file from yesterday. Then, through iTunes, I submitted my podcast and a few hours later, I received notification that I am an approved podcast producer, with full access to the Apple Discussions Forum, exclusively for podcast producers. (I never knew there was such a thing.)
If you click this link, it should subscribe you to the podcast. I’ve got more work to do and fine tuning, which is why I’m so interested in playing with this now, to get the bugs worked out before we go live.  I think I’ll lower the bit-rate again to get the file size down further, the first one I did a couple of weeks ago came out at a whopping 32mb and yesterday’s was around 11mb.
Yesterday’s sermon started with a skit with Noah and the sound starts out a little hot, although I tried to tone it down. Noah is someone wearing a full ‘Noah’ mask with a lapel mic inside the mask so that’s probably as good as it gets. So, get beyond the skit, then I would love any feedback on how to improve it, especially from those that do this well.
Clif, I wish I could have picked your brain on Friday before we ran out of time, but I’ll still probably do that sometime soon.
Finally, I still need to get some cheesy intro music and a cheesy introduction, but my problem is, I don’t want it to be cheesy, I want good music with a clean, professional introduction. Mary has agreed to be the voice of the Fairview Christian Church podcast, so we’ll get that done soon.
Jim,
It’s great that you’re podcasting your sermons. I know you said go to after the drama segment, but I wanted to make a couple of comments that could help that as well . . .
1. Fades. I use Pro-Tools for editing audio, but for simple file manipulation and fades in/out, I use Audacitiy. It’s free, and it will not only open your wave/AIFF, or whatever your source file is, but will also handle your mp3 encoding duties. Simple fades at the beginning, between segments (like the God talking to Noag segment), and at the end will be much less jarring to your listeners and sound more professional.
2. Levels. Your levels sound pretty consistent adter the drama piece. Audacity will also help even out your levels between the drama and the rest of the audio.
3. E.Q. Applying a low cut (high pass) filter to the audio from the mic in the mask would also help to marry the two segments.
4. File Size. This is very subjective. At my church we have decided not to be too concerned about the file size. I do encode mono soundfiles, but I keep the quality pretty high. Over 80% of active internet users are using broadband connections, so we don’t mind a larger file size. Of course, bandwidth concerns may dicate a smaller file size, but from a user point of view, we try to keep the quality high.
5. RSS creation. I use Feeder by Reinvented Software, but I use a mac. I haven’t used anything for a PC to create the RSS.
Here’s a few links I think may be helpful.
FEEDER SOFTWARE
http://reinventedsoftware.com/
BROADBAND USAGE STATS
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0703/
AUDACITY AUDIO SOFTWARE
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Happy Podcasting!
Don’t forget about your non iPod listeners out there
dj
Here’s the mp3, does that help? As a non-ipod user, what are you looking for? I’m trying to learn here.
http://www.churchtechmatters.com/fairview/20070708/20070708First.mp3
Jim,
I saw this link on another blog and thought you’d be interested.
http://mashable.com/2007/07/04/podcasting-toolbox/
Jim,
What I am looking for is the xml address that I could subscribe to. Just like a blog, a podcast uses an address for a subscription. What did you send to iTunes?
dj
The good news is that with the Web-Empowered Church (WEC) Sermon Management System extension, the XML for the podcast is automatically created and you do not need worry about those details. If you’d like to see the Sermon Management System in action, you can see it here: http://ginghamsburg.org/sermon/ and the podcast file here: http://ginghamsburg.org/sermonpodcast.
We encode all our MP3 files at 32K bits/second. This has the added benefit of being playable live on the website even over a modem connection using the Web-Empowered Church Player.
In Christ,
Mark
I use feedburner to take my rss feed and 1) hide my actual site and 2) provide a feed that will never need to change. right now I am using blogger to backend my podcast and publish to a hidden directory on our webserver that no one ever needs to visit – I plan to convert this to wordpress when we change web hosts… I will only need to update my feedburner account and my subscribers will never know.